16% Cybercrime cases increased in Mumbai compared to last year. 

Mumbai police commissioner Hemant Nagrale said on Tuesday – ‘The Golden Hour’ plays a vital role in solving cybercrime, like saving lives after an accident. He said if reported early, the police could recover the money that was defrauded and reduce to loss to the victim. 

Nagrale said citizens victimized by cyber fraudsters should report the crime within an hour – to the nearest cyber crime police station because then the chances of blocking the payments made and recovering the money are high. 

The data released by an official at the annual crime conference revealed that cybercrimes increased by 16% last year compared to 2020. The Mumbai police registered 2.883 cases across cyber cells, and local police detected 455 or 15.78% of cases in 2021. In 2020, 2,435 cases were reported, of which only 207 were seen. 

In 2019, 2518 cases were registered when the city had only one dedicated cyber police station at Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC), and 348 cases were detected. Due to the lockdown in 2020, there was a decrease in cases. 

Most of the cybercrime cases in Mumbai are fraud, extortion, sexual abuse, and personal defamation. 

Further, he said, “Earlier, there was only one cyber police station in BKC for the entire city. But now we have five such stations, one in each zone, which comes under the crime branch and deputy commissioner of cybercrime. 

The detection rate in the cyber police station is better than the 13% detection rate in regular police stations. He said; we are developing these units with better equipment and providing training to officers and staff to help them detect more cyber cases. The crime branch will conduct the training. 

He said some of the reasons for the low detection rate of cybercrime are because it is a faceless crime. “The servers used for cybercrime are mostly located outside India, and social media platforms are not responding in time. There are other legal processes as well which are time-consuming, and cyber fraudsters use Tor Browser and some other sites which are difficult to identify” – Nagrale said in  

Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime Branch) Milind Bharambe said that it had been observed that the fraudsters were primarily from outside Maharashtra. “Some of the places, which are cybercrime hubs, are in Bihar, Rajasthan, and Jharkhand. As a result, it is quite difficult to trace the culprits.” 

Published by- Aashay Bhujbal

Edited by- Kritika Kashyap